Penn and Teller want to know just how far people will go to sort their rubbish for recycling, so they invent some new coloured bins and spurious ways to sort trash. OK, they're poking fun at good people who are willing to make an effort to do something for the environment, which isn't cool. But they're right that we should all be wary of "greenwashing" from local government just as much as from retail businesses.
And as I've said before - if you recycle a lot, you should think about consuming less instead. Perhaps the household in your street who never puts out any plastic bottles for recycling aren't buying lots of stuff in plastic bottles in the first place, which would be much better.
Cartoon from Throbgoblins. Click on the panel to read the whole strip.
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6 comments:
Nothing to do with Sunday funnies ...
I just thought that you might want to share in the excitement as Laura, Amy and I have picked some rocket and have made a salad with it. We're all so excited as we've never grown anything like that before. The girls are bouncing away with excitement.
There's only one snag ... I was so convinced that it wouldn't grow or would be eaten by the slugs that I hadn't planted any more. (I have put some seeds in now though.)
Em
ps It was lovely meeting you properly yesterday.
It was nice meeting you, too Em. Congratulation on your rocket, and even more for getting kids to eat salad!
All cynicism aside, the green consciousness does seem to shifting from the color of plant life to the color of money death as entrepreneurs see profit in the new green gadget market. As if the great global thingathon didn't pave the way to our situation in the first place! Throwing money at problems too icky for us to soil ourselves with, or care to understand well enough to notice that nothing's getting done, is the same kind of wiggling in quicksand that brought us to our original awareness. Changing our personal, individual relationship to the planet to become more symbiotic is the only change that matters. The starvation of the bloated, parasitic tick of corporate greed is a beneficial byproduct of our reverence for the nature of which we are a part — voting for and paying others to make us do the right thing is no longer an excuse.
Hear hear on the recyclables. Reducing packaging is so worthwhile. I actually just quit drinking seltzer water bz the number of bottles (plastic *or* glass) in my recycling was so ridiculous. My recycling has dropped accordingly and that's a good thing - which only came from me shutting myself off from buying that product.
True! When we switched from fruit juice in #2 plastic bottles to canned juice concentrate in metal cans, our recycling bin volume went way down. I stopped drinking individual bottled water and it went down again! Reduce FIRST, then reuse; recycle comes LAST.
Just another Hear! Hear! for eliminating waste rather than recycling it!
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